The Shooting. James Boice

meant to me and how in love we were, and what it was like having her die in my arms because of the NRA. Jenny did not know what Kaylee meant to me. No one did. Kaylee meant everything. Everything. But I could not remember her anymore. Now whenever I tried to remember her, all I could see was the picture I showed to men with all the money and power right before they told me there was nothing they could do. I did not even know whom I was talking about anymore when I said Kaylee’s name. The reality—the real her, the real me, the real us—was gutted. I had gutted it. I should never have shown anyone her picture, I should never have told anyone about her neck, the heartbeat I thought was hers. I had turned Kaylee into something inhuman, I had desecrated her. I had desecrated myself. Because now I could not even remember Kaylee. I could not remember the girl I loved. I could only remember the politics, the men with guns. And Jenny.

      Lawmakers stopped taking our meetings. Maybe now and again an aide with nothing better to do might come downstairs and meet us in the lobby, let me desecrate Kaylee for him, hear Jenny out about the science and the data and the tide, ensure us the administration was taking the issue very seriously before excusing himself.

      —It’s working! Jenny kept saying. —We’re making progress! All we have to do is keep doing what we’re doing and not let up!

      Late one evening we sat around a table at headquarters, holding an all-night strategy session in advance of a big meeting (sleeping bags had been brought in for the staff), when Jenny began crying and did not stop. The little Jennys around us pretended not to notice. They said, —Thanks, Jenny! Thanks, everybody! and gathered their notepads and devices and scattered to their workstations, leaving me and her alone. I had never seen someone so lonely. Even her style of crying was lonely: hunched forward, curled small and tight into herself with her elbows on the table and hands over her face, shaking silently. I did not know what would happen. I watched her, the narrow hands with the veins sticking out and liver spots beginning to appear, her skinny frail wrists that looked anything but unbreakable, the strands of gray hair she had missed when she had dyed it herself in the bathroom of her hotel room.

      —Jenny? I said. —Are you okay? She did not answer. I reached over, touched her shoulder. —Jenny?

      —Get away from me! she yelled into her hands. —Don’t touch me!

      I jumped up and away, startled. I looked at the little Jennys. They pretended not to see. None of them looked away from her work. They just left her there at the table until they all went to sleep on the floor in sleeping bags. They turned the lights off on her. I covered her with a spare blanket. She was still shaking. Not crying, I realized. Shivering. Was I alone in seeing what it all was doing to her? That she lived on some kind of precipice and one day she would go over into the abyss, taking with her whoever happened to be holding on to her at the time? Would any of the others have believed me if I had told them Jenny Sanders, like any of us, was not the person she believed she was?

      In the morning I woke to the sounds of Beyoncé. I found Jenny bouncing around with her disciples before a whiteboard, on which was written a day’s full agenda. —We’re making progress, Jenny shouted at me over the music.

      I felt exhausted and useless. I told her I was done. She told me I needed to change my mind, but before long a former graduate student at a university in Washington State drove through campus in his Kia Sorento with a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol and a box of fully loaded sixteen-round magazines in the passenger seat (the gun and the bullets he had bought as part of the surge in guns and ammo sales resulting from Jenny’s Battle of Texas), shooting at every woman and girl he saw, killing nine and paralyzing three and injuring twelve more before police could stop him. Jenny said goodbye via text from the airport as she boarded her flight to Washington. I tried calling her a few times over the next few months, but one of her little Jennys always assured me she was in a meeting or on a call or traveling and would absolutely call me back first chance. She never did. I never spoke to Jenny Sanders again. I saw her only on TV and in news stories like this I read now, today’s shooting. Tomorrow will bring tomorrow’s shooting, and like today’s it will make me remember it all. All of it, that is, but Kaylee.

      We’re making progress! Keep doing what you’re doing and don’t let up! I did not understand Jenny’s optimism in the face of completely contradictory facts until later, when hackers got into the RSA’s servers and dumped its until-then-confidential financial and membership data and I learned for the first time how much money had been coming in to RSA during that time, how many new memberships, how the visibility of Jenny’s movement grew like a second sun in the sky over the nation.

      Victory at the Battle of Texas.

      People ask me: What is she like?

      I always answer: There is nothing Jenny Sanders would not do to save us. Nothing at all.